What you ask, why did the dude just remake an old model intead of doing something new?

Obviously because this was my learning object for texturing, i followed some pretty nice tutorial (atleast some elements of it) And tested out my current problem zones with these techniques (Kinda sucks you can't edit mesh after uvw mapping it.. without messing it up)

While doing so, i improved/messed with the model a bit, gave it a nicer weapon and added some missiles in an totally random and nonsensical position

Normally you can't edit the mesh after unwrapping. This changes the mesh and the unwrapping you did will no longer be valid. But if somehow you can collapse the entire model, like flattening the entire layer stack in Photoshop, you can edit the mesh safely. That's what I do in 3ds Max

Funny thing is, in my scraps you can watch how it turns from ok to ugly to extreme horrid to extremely well looking, textures with advanced shaders are so fragile and one little wrong setting breaks them ;/

90% of the time for my renderings are wasted on deciding which button to press to make it look better, with a 40% chance to make it look worse